Economic Geography: A

Contemporary Introduction

Neil M. Coe, Philip F. Kelly, and Henry W.C.

Yeung
Final submission: July 2006

To be published by Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, in April 2007.

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 Contents

Preface

Part 1: Conceptual foundations

Chapter 1 A geographical approach to the economy
Chapter 2 Economic discourse – does ‘the economy’ really exist?

Part 2: Dynamics of economic space

Chapter 3 Uneven development – why is economic growth and development so uneven?
Chapter 4 Commodity chains – where does your breakfast come from?
Chapter 5 Technology and agglomeration – does technology eradicate distance?
Chapter 6 Environment/economy – can nature be a commodity?

Part 3: Actors in economic space

Chapter 7 The state – who controls the economy: firms or governments?
Chapter 8 The transnational corporation – how does the global firm keep it all together?
Chapter 9 Labour power – can workers shape economic geographies?
Chapter 10 Consumption – who controls spaces of sales and consumption?

Part 4: Socialising economic life

Chapter 11 Culture and the firm – do countries and companies have economic cultures?
Chapter 12 Gendered economic geographies – does gender shape economic lives?
Chapter 13 Ethnic economies – do cultures have economies?

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 Preface

The world around us is powerfully shaped by economic forces. The economy, as we experience it in
everyday life, is innately geographical. There is no economy ‘out there’, floating in the atmosphere,
detached from the lived reality. Rather the economy is a set of grounded, real world processes, a set
of complex social relations that vary enormously across, and because of, geographical space. Our
argument in this book is that the set of approaches offered by the field of economic geography is
best placed to help us appreciate and understand the modern economic world in all its complexity.
To ignore geographical variation leads to a retreat into the unreal, hypothetical world of mainstream
economics, with all its many underlying assumptions and simplifications.

In the pages that follow, we adopt a particular approach in making our case for an economic-
geographical perspective. Before outlining this approach, we should be clear about what this book is
not! This note is especially important for instructors and professors teaching economic geography
courses. First, our book is not a statistical and factual compendium on the current geographies of the
global economy. In other words, this is not an almanac for economic geography courses; there are
many such books already available in the market. The Internet is now a much more effective medium
to access contemporary economic data, which has an exceptionally short shelf-life. Hence, we are not
primarily concerned with how much coal there is in Northeast England or Shenyang, China, or how
many textile factories are located in Bangladesh or the Mexican maquiladoras. Moreover, we do not
attempt to offer a systematic survey of all parts of the global economy, either by sector or by region.
Again, this kind of economic geography text is already available.

Second, the book is not structured as an intellectual history of economic geography, systematically
charting a path from the subdiscipline’s origins in the commercial geographies of the late 19th century
through to the very pluralist economic geography that exists today. Neither does it offer a series of
literature reviews of work at the research frontiers of contemporary economic geography. Existing
‘readers’ and ‘companions’ offer exactly such an access to the economic geography literature (Bryson
et al., 1999; Barnes et al., 2003). Our view is that many undergraduate students are initially nervous
and/or ambivalent about this intellectual history approach, and that we first need to engage them
fully in the substantive issues of economic life. By demonstrating the insights economic geography can
offer, students will then be equipped to later explore the intellectual and methodological lineage of
the field.

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Third, the book deliberately blurs the distinction between economic geography and what has
conventionally been labelled ‘development geography’. In various ways, we have woven issues of
development, poverty and inequality into our discussion of an economic-geographical perspective,
thereby rejecting the notion that development geography is about the Global South and economic
geography is about the Global North. By integrating substantive issues and empirical examples from
across the globe, we adopt a more inclusive approach to economic geography.

Given these parameters, what then is this book really about? In its essence, this book takes the form
of a series of linked chapters on topical issues and contemporary debates that draw upon, and showcase,
the best of economic geography research. These issues are drawn from contemporary economic life,
which is increasingly constituted at a global scale – from uneven development, space-shrinking
technologies, and environmental degradation to powerful global corporations, organized labour, and
ethnic economies. We see each of these as issues rather than just phenomena – that is, they are
processes to be debated rather than factual realities to be described. Each chapter thus seeks to
answer a significant contemporary question that a curious and well-informed undergraduate reader
might reasonably be expected to ask about the world around them.

This, then, is not a conventional text: our aim is to develop well-grounded arguments from an
economic geography perspective, not necessarily to present simplifications of multiple viewpoints or
collections of facts and data. We are, however, trying to develop these arguments in straightforward
and accessible ways. The book is intended to be used in introductory courses in economic geography
in the first or second year of an undergraduate degree programme. The chapters should be seen as
bases for discussion rather than collections of facts and truths needing to be reproduced in
examination scripts. Nor are they intended to substitute for classroom lectures to elaborate on some
of the theoretical themes or empirical case studies provided here. It is a book very much intended to
support an introductory course in economic geography and to socialize students into the fascinating
world of contemporary economic geographical research.

Notwithstanding the above comments, in this book we are seeking to advance and advocate a certain
kind of economic geography, although this underlying position, for reasons alluded to above, is not
always made explicit on a chapter-by-chapter basis. From the outset, however, it is important that
readers – and particularly instructors and professors – are at least aware of how our favoured
approach sits within the sub-discipline of economic geography more broadly. In short, we seek to
combine the best of both the political economy perspective that entered economic geography from the
1970s onwards and the new economic geographies that are generally seen to have risen to prominence

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since 1990 (see Box 1.2 for more). We are not championing and legitimizing an either/or approach
to the theoretical and empirical insights afforded by these perspectives. Such an epistemological or
paradigmatic debate is much better covered in more advanced texts (e.g. Hudson, 2004). Instead, we
intend this book to be a celebration of multiple theoretical perspectives, including the new economic
geographies, in contemporary economic geography research.

The political economy perspective is now well known in economic geography, but we should
distinguish clearly how our conception of new economic geographies is different from the
quantitative modelling version of so-called ‘new economic geography’ in economics (e.g. Krugman,
2000; Fujita and Krugman, 2004). In common with other economic geographers, we will refer to the
latter as ‘geographical economics’. ‘New economic geography’ is a very different proposition and
describes an approach to economic geography that has been influenced by the recent ‘cultural turn’
in human geography (and the wider social sciences). This has created a geographical approach to the
economy that contextualizes economic processes by situating them within different social, political,
and cultural relations.

In doing so, new economic geography is not merely concerned with the economic realm, but also
with how such a realm is intertwined with other spheres of social life. While there are publications
that encapsulate the various dimensions of this broad approach (e.g. Lee and Wills, 1997; Barnes and
Sheppard, 2000), we believe this is the first textbook that seeks to demonstrate the benefits of such a
multi-faceted approach to an undergraduate audience. Moreover, our aim in this book is to try and
blend the nuanced insights of these new economic geographies about everyday economic life with
the analytical rigour that a political economy approach brings to understanding the inherent logics
and mechanisms of the capitalist system, and the social and spatial inequities that it actively
(re)produces. We also take from the political economy perspective a critical and normative stance
that leads us to question and interrogate constantly those inequities. We therefore make an explicit
effort to demonstrate the value-added of such a geographical approach in relation to conventional
economic analyses of these topics.

The book itself is structured around answering thirteen important questions that arise in everyday
economic life. We also preface these questions, listed as each chapter heading, with an important
analytical theme. Part One of the book is entitled ‘Conceptual foundations’ and explores in turn the
‘geography’ and ‘economic’ of economic geography. Chapter 1 counterposes a geographical view on
the economy with that which might be adopted by a mainstream economist, and introduces the key
geographical vocabulary of space, place and scale. Chapter 2 unpacks the apparently commonsense

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notion of ‘the economy’ as something ‘static’ and ‘out there’ in conventional economics to reveal
how we might think about the economy in more creative and critical ways. In Part Two on ‘Dynamics
of economic space’, we focus on four broad dynamics inherent to the capitalist system: uneven
geographical development (Chapter 3), commodity chains and their role in organizing economic
space (Chapter 4), technological change and its ability to alter (albeit unevenly and partially) the
geography of the economy (Chapter 5), and the commodification of nature and the environment
(Chapter 6). Part Three, ‘Actors in economic space’, looks at four main groups of actors that play an
active role in shaping economic geographies, namely the state, in all its scalar forms (Chapter 7),
transnational corporations (Chapter 8), labour/workers (Chapter 9) and consumers (Chapter 10). In
Part Four, entitled ‘Socialising economic life’ – and here we draw in particular on the so-called ‘new
economic geographies’ – we bring in the dimensions of culture (Chapter 11), gender (Chapter 12),
and ethnicity (Chapter 13) to our understanding of the spatial organization of economic activity,
explicitly moving beyond conventional economic analysis to incorporate consideration of how these
‘non-economic’ variables shape economic processes.

A few further caveats should be noted at this point. First, in a text of this type and length we cannot
hope to cover every aspect of economic geography, either within individual chapters, or across the
book as a whole. We do, however, feel that we have covered the most significant debates in which
economic geographers have been active and offering valuable insights in recent decades. Second, the
book’s structure and scope makes it impossible to explore all the intersections between the chapter
topics: in producing a text of this kind, some simplification is inevitable. Gender and ethnicity, for
example, are bracketed out into separate chapters but in reality could be part of many others, and
indeed heavily intersect themselves. Our strategy has been to break up economic geography into
manageable and relatively coherent segments for an undergraduate audience and to use the
introductory chapters in Part 1 to offer a more integrative analysis and to clearly differentiate our
field from mainstream economics. Extensive cross-referencing of chapters also helps to make
explicit connections between different themes, examples, arguments and case studies in various
chapters.

Each chapter in this book follows a similar structure. We open with what we call the ‘hook’; a
(hopefully engaging) contemporary example or issue used to introduce the key theme of the chapter.
In the second section we tackle a commonly held myth or misapprehension about the topic at hand
(e.g. the nation state is dead or transnational corporations are all powerful) and illustrate how these
myths often rest, in large part, on an ‘ageographical’ (i.e. non-geographical) understanding of the
world around us, particularly in mainstream economics. The main body of each chapter then serves

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to illustrate the necessity and effectiveness of taking an explicitly geographical approach for
understanding different aspects of the economy. Our aim is to make these arguments in a clearly
understandable, lightly referenced, jargon-free manner, drawing on a wide range of examples from
across different sectors of the economy, and from around the world. Boxes within the text (three to
five per chapter, on average) offer further development of key concepts, case studies and examples
for the reader, and the diagrams and photographs have been carefully chosen to illustrate further the
various points we are making. The penultimate section of the chapter is designed to add a ‘twist’ to
the arguments that have preceded it; or in other words, to probe somewhat more deeply into the
complexity of contemporary economic geographies. Additional nuances and insights are offered in
these twists. Each chapter then concludes with a deliberately short and pithy summary of the main
themes covered.

What lies after the summary is also very important. First, for ease of use, the reference list is included
on a chapter by chapter basis. For the instructor, this is also meant to facilitate use of the chapters in
a more ‘modular’ manner that does not have to deal with topics in the order we have presented them
here. Second, the further reading section guides the reader towards what we identify as the most
engaging and accessible literature on the chapter’s topic. To be clear, our objective here is not to
bamboozle the reader with complicated and advanced texts at the cutting-edges of geographical
research, but rather to select readings that further explicate and develop our arguments in a digestible
manner for an undergraduate audience. Some of these readings identify the sources of well known
case studies we have drawn from the geographical literature, enabling students to ‘flesh out’ the
inevitably brief summaries we have been able to offer in the text. Third, we identify up to five online
resources per chapter that can also be used to supplement the chapters. Overall, our intention is to
offer an exploration of economic geography rich in examples and case studies that can, on the one
hand, open students to economic life and practices in various parts of the world, and, at the same
time, introduce concepts that can be ‘put to work’ in local contexts. Hence the text can be used
alongside local literature and case studies wherever the book is used.

Acknowledgements.
In an undertaking of this scale and scope, we have certainly benefited from the generous help and
assistance of various people and institutions and we would like to acknowledge them here. Our
editor at Blackwell, Justin Vaughan, has been patient and supportive as this project has slowly and
steadily moved towards completion. We are very grateful for his ongoing encouragement and
confidence in our project, as we are for the excellent editorial assistance of Ben Thatcher and Kelvin
Mathews at Blackwell. We would also like to thank the many anonymous reviewers who helpfully

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and constructively commented on the book proposal in its various iterations. Trevor Barnes, in
particular, deserves special mention. He has been most generous and helpful on many different
occasions, and his detailed comments on the earlier version of the full manuscript were extremely
important in guiding our revisions. Peter Dicken has been our primary inspiration in trying to
become better economic geographers and in striving to improve the accessibility and visibility of the
subdiscipline. Gavin Bridge and Tim Bunnell kindly commented on individual chapters. Clive
Agnew, Gavin Bridge, Martin Hess and Richard Phillips gave us permission to reproduce their
photos in the book. Graham Bowden did a fantastic job of producing all the figures in the book,
sometimes at extremely short notice, and often from almost unintelligible scribblings! None of these
individuals, however, are responsible for any errors or mistakes that remain.

In order to overcome the tyranny of geographical distance, we met three times, in Singapore
(December 2004), Manchester (July 2005), and Bellagio (February 2006) to discuss face-to-face the
book proposal, detailed structure, chapter drafts and so on. These intensive meetings were
supplemented by many other brief exchanges when the two or three of us got together during
professional meetings or whilst on research trips. Various institutions provided financial support for
these meetings, either directly or indirectly. In particular, we would like to thank the Rockefeller
Foundation for its Team Residency Award that enabled us to work together for almost ten days in
February 2006 in the tranquil setting of its Conference Center located in Bellagio, Italy. We are
enormously grateful to our referees for their support: Ann Markusen, Jamie Peck, and Trevor
Barnes. Various resident fellows at the Bellagio Center, and Tom Bassett in particular, shared many
interesting insights and suggestions for the project. We are also grateful to the staff at Bellagio,
particularly Pilar Palacia and Laura Podio, who took care of us during our stay. The following
institutions also funded our travels and/or hosted some parts of the manuscript writing: Isaac
Manasseh Meyer Fellowship, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore (Neil); the
Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Asian Institute at the University of
Toronto, the Department of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, and the Asian
Metacentre at the National University of Singapore (Philip); and, the Faculty Research Support
Scheme of the National University of Singapore , and the International Centre for the Study of East
Asian Development, Kitakyushu (Henry).

At the more personal level, we all would like to thank our respective colleagues, friends and families
for their support and understanding. Neil would like to thank, in Manchester, his fellow economic
geographers – Gavin Bridge, Noel Castree, Martin Hess, Jennifer Johns and Kevin Ward – for
creating a stimulating, collegial and fun working environment; the golf gang – Tim Allott, Martin

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Evans and Chris Perkins – for occasional, but much needed distraction; and Clive Agnew, Michael
Bradford and Fiona Smyth for their support and encouragement. More broadly, he is extremely
grateful for the ongoing support offered by Trevor Barnes, Ray Hudson, Lily Kong, Jamie Peck,
Roger Lee, David Sadler and Neil Wrigley. Closer to home, heartfelt thanks go to Laura and Adam
for generally heeding the cries of ‘don’t go down the basement, Daddy’s working down there’, and
even more so for occasionally ignoring them! And Emma, the rest is down to you. Your support is
much appreciated.

Philip is grateful to colleagues and family in Toronto who have supported this endeavour, knowingly
or unknowingly, along the way - either on the ‘production line’ of research assistance, in the
‘industrial milieu’ of academic life, or in the ‘domestic sphere’ of a larger life. They are: Keith
Barney, Ranu Basu, John and Susan Britton, Simon Chilvers, Raju Das, Anne-Marie Debbané, Don
Freeman, Sutama Ghosh, William Jenkins, Lucia Lo, Tom Lusis, Glen Norcliffe, Linda Peake, Cesar
Polvorosa, Valerie Preston, John Radford, Esther Rootham, Robin Roth, Peter Vandergeest, and
Junjia Ye. In addition, Alexander and Jack Kelly have grown alongside this book; hopefully they will
show more interest in future editions! Finally, Hayley Britton is still my sine qua non.

Henry is immensely grateful to Weiyu, Kay, and Lucas for their tolerance of an ‘absentee’
husband/father during those writing trips. The earlier-than-expected arrival of Lucas in November
2005 also inadvertently delayed our Bellagio meeting originally scheduled for early December. He is
thankful to Neil and Phil and Susan Garfield at Rockefeller for reworking their schedules to
accommodate the postponed Bellagio meeting. To Lucas, he would like to offer this book as his first
big present from Dad.

NC, PK and HY: Glossop, Toronto and Singapore, July 2006

References:
Barnes, T.J., Peck, J., Sheppard, E. and Tickell, A. (eds.) (2003) Reading Economic Geography, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Bryson, J., Henry, N., Keeble, D. and Martin, R. (eds.) (1999) The Economic Geography Reader: Producing
and Consuming Global Capitalism, Chichester: John Wiley.
Fujita, M. and Krugman, P. (2004) The new economic geography: past, present and the future, Papers
in Regional Science, pp.139-64.
Hudson, R. (2004) Economic Geographies, London: Sage.
Krugman, P. (2000) Where in the world is the ‘new economic geography’?, in G.L. Clark, M.A.
Feldman, and M.S. Gertler (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, OUP, Oxford, pp.49-60.

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Lee, R. and Wills, J. (eds.) (1997), Geographies of Economies, Arnold, London.
Sheppard, E. and Barnes, T. (2000) (eds.) A companion to economic geography, Blackwell, Oxford.

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